A Novel about a Novel

I'm publishing a whole novel on Medium in installments. It's a novel about publishing of a novel. Obviously, the idea hit me in the wake of my first novel being accepted by a great publisher.  Shit, I forgot to write about it here in my blog, a serious lapse on my side, but that's me, my habit of keeping dumb when I should be actually shouting out.

Yesterday I wrote my fifth installment. And now I feel a bit exhausted. I'm a minimalist by nature, but these past few days I've knocked out 800 or so words regularly. This naturally takes its toll on my body and mind. I want to take a deep breath now. I need to take a second wind.

The following is a list of chapters arranged sequentially in case you've not read it or just want to take a look.

Publishing of a novel
 (How I got my book deal for my novel which I wrote back in 2000)

Serendipity and After/2
(An editor's dilemma)

Serendipity and After/3
(Editor-publisher face-off)


Serendipity and After/4
(How things get sorted out and the publishing house embraces peace at last)

Serendipity and After/5
(About a Facebook post in which I was tagged)

As a writer, I'm curious what the readers think about this novel and how their reading experience is. So, please come in with your feedback. I will appreciate them. Thanking you.

James Wood on Joy Williams

She writes at a slight angle to the culture, literary and otherwise. Her fiction is easy to follow and hard to fathom; easy to enjoy and harder to absorb.

How to Write a Sex Scene

If you want to write an excellent sex scene, you have to liberate it from the idea of a sex scene. Like I was saying before about violence, you have to thread sexuality through every part of a character or a person's life, rather than limiting it to a titillating few pages where something juicy happens. You have to understand that sexuality is omnipresent in your body — your entire life.

--Lidia Yuknavitch

Is it good fiction?

Yesterday I posted a critique of a short fiction by Oliver Shiny on Medium. Please do read it if you have time, and weigh in with your comments on my critique. 

George Saunders Quotes

I’ve always – always – thought of myself as a fiction writer with comic inclinations. 

I’m a fiction writer. I use any- and everything I need to get certain effects that I’d describe as ‘emotional effects’ – to do the good old aesthetic work that stories do. 

do whatever it takes. Steer toward the energy. Don’t worry about being edgy or not being edgy or being soppy – if the emotion of the story is real and earned, it sort of retroactively justifies whatever form you’ve used.

What’s going to make my work vital and new is my taste, applied maniacally, over sufficient time.

I really want to play, and discover the internal dynamics of the story – find out, via intuition, what thrills the story wants to deliver.

Mahasweta gun-saluted!

Yesterday on TV I saw the state gun-saluting Mahasweta Devi's body as a mark of its ultimate respect to the great writer and activist.

Mahasweta Devi passes away at 91

Mahasweta Devi, the Bengali writer  who was the "Mother Courage" of Bengal and devi of the marginalized and the dispossessed, died yesterday at 91 leaving a legacy no one can match. 

8 Essential Attributes of a short story / Joy Williams

1) There should be a clean clear surface with much disturbance below 

2) An anagogical level

3) Sentences that can stand strikingly alone

4) An animal within to give its blessing

Recommended Reading: When Will Helen DeWitt be recognized as one of the Great American Novelists?

When Will Helen DeWitt be Recognized As one of the Great American Novelists?

“The self is a set of linguistic patterns,” she said. “Reading and speaking in another language is like stepping into an alternate history of yourself where all the bad connotations are gone.”

Language in Literature

"Even though we should always strive to renew the language, that renewal can and should use words from other times and from other spaces to better express this new version of human events. Literature has to dig into uncomfortable vocabularies to find new ways of expression."

--Yuri Herrera

Who reads Norman Mailer these days?

"Where is Norman Mailer? Who reads Norman Mailer? Who thinks about Norman Mailer? People who have been celebrity writers, they become societal documents of their era. In that way Kerouac, Mailer, Ginsberg —"

Elie Wiesel Quote

• "I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." (The Nobel Peace Prize speech, 1986)

Cynthia Ozick on Next American Great Novel or Novelist

"..can we see any inkling of a presumptive heir 

to Bellow or Updike orNabokov, or to so many others of 

the previous generation (the list would be long and 

impressive) who have left a formative mark on American 

experience?

From Ta-Nehisi Coates interview

 I had a variety of experiences, but it’s not mystical. It’s not in the genes or in the bones.

Excerpt from a review of Zero K /Don DeLillo

"Like the philosophy of the older Heidegger, DeLillo’s is a heightening of the acts of naming and making art and poetry. If anything can save us, it’s art. And yet art’s being escapes its naming. And in what may quite possibly be his final novelistic effort, Don DeLillo has worked out a contentment with the fact that life’s highest cause for reverence is finally, is merely, just such a static escape."

Peter Zilahy on people working in publishing

"In fact, as far as I can tell, there are not many people working in the publishing business that can actually read."

Peter Zilahy

What it means to be a writer

"If you don’t connect with other people, then it’s impossible to write realistically about contemporary issues.

Good literature comes from small places/ Sjón

".. novels are my bedrock. And Iceland is their bedrock. I think all good literature comes from small places, small parts of society, because that’s where the roles become visible, the social mechanism clear."

Don't writers want to be remembered for their work now?

"All I am providing is a form of entertainment. I don’t demand that readers remember me, or that they remember the content of every story, as long as they enjoy my novels and get happiness from them." 

The inevitable question now is: don't we writers want to be remembered for our work? Is it only about the present? Is it only about cash and short-lived fame? Is it the prevalent writerly attitude now?

What is a story about?

"Any story is about a host of things. It is about the author; it is about the world the author sees and deals with and lives in;